In recent years, services of providing video information from web servers on the Internet have been widely used. To receive these services, users download the video information from the web servers by using their own terminals. Since a long time is required to download data, there has been developed a method of allowing a terminal to download data from a server at high speed by using multiple paths as similar to parallel transfer of data between computers (For example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-215497).
Meanwhile, studies have also been made on a method of performing parallel transfer of content between servers of studios in a broadcasting station or between a server in a center station and a server in a local station to transfer the content at high speed. The video data, however, is compressed and encoded. Thus, the video data having such nature requires a receiver to perform complicated processing for reconstructing the data frame when a transmitter simply divides the video data into pieces in order to perform the parallel transfer of the video data. For this reason, the parallel transfer of video data has not been carried out in practice.
In recent broadcasting stations, files of content data have been stored in program servers. In this respect, the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) has defined MXF (Material eXchange Format) standards as a unified format for exchanging video and audio data files, and the broadcasting stations have introduced a technique of exchanging stream data of broadcast content in conformity with the MXF standards.
Stream data of broadcast content compressed and encoded in conformity with standards such as MPEG2 are written and stored as MXF files in a storage apparatus, or are transferred between servers and the like. In order to play or transfer stream data from halfway, it is necessary to analyze the structure of the MXF file, detect the information on the head position of each frame or GOP (group of pictures), and set processing and procedure which enable reconstruction of the structure of the file. As a result, a problem arises that such setting makes the processing of parallel transfer of content data complicated.